Undeterred by the collapse of Terra USD stablecoin, a former Terra developer Neel Somani has successfully raised $15 million for his Solana-based cross-chain modular startup Eclipse. He launched the Eclipse project when the project – Terranova, an Ethereum Virtual Machine project designed to connect the TerraUSD stablecoin ecosystem to Ethereum collapsed.
Somani shared that if the blockchain he was building on failed, then he would be completely exposed and there was really no way to mitigate the risk. He said roll-up as a service starts to make a lot of sense because one doesn’t have to worry about security with their solution. One also doesn’t have to worry about reliability because the L1 can always be changed. Somani began his crypto engineering work as a part-time endeavor and avoid publicity.
He simultaneously came up with the idea to take the Solana virtual machine and make it its own chain in some way, shape, or form. The former Citadel quantitative analyst shared that when the Terra project collapsed, he picked up where he left off. Somani took advantage of previous connections and his proximity to Solana and thus, founded Eclipse. Initially, potential investors saw Somani’s involvement with Terra’s stablecoin as a point of concern. Eclipse is also regarded as a response to Terra’s mistakes. It’s designed to be deployed on multiple chains in case a Terra-like event happens again. Somani said he didn’t want to tie himself to the reliability of a single channel.
The startup intends to open source its first protocol release early next year. Eclipse is stated to be a layer-2 network that allows users to transfer value between blockchains. It wants to be more flexible than the current slate of cross-chain protocols, letting developers deploy rollups across multiple layer-1s.
